It seems that in 1896-1897 there was a wave of mysterious Airship sightings across the US.
These bear a striking similarity to the 20th Century's UFO sightings, that also came in waves.
For example from the Wikipedia article:

Mystery
airships or phantom airships are a class of unidentified flying objects
best known from a series of newspaper reports originating in the
western United States and spreading east during 1896 and 1897.[1]
According to researcher Jerome Clark, airship reports were made
worldwide, early as the 1880s, and late as the 1890s.[2] Mystery airship
reports are seen as a cultural predecessor to modern
extraterrestrial-piloted flying saucer-style UFO claims.[3]

Typical
airship reports involved unidentified lights, but more detailed
accounts reported ships comparable to a dirigible.[4] Reports of the
alleged crewmen and pilots usually described them as human looking,
although sometimes the crew claimed to be from Mars.[4] It was popularly
believed that the mystery airships were the product of some genius
inventor not ready to make knowledge of his creation public.[5] Thomas
Edison was so widely speculated to be the mind behind the alleged
airships that in 1897 he "was forced to issue a strongly worded
statement" denying his responsibility.[6]

Mystery airships are
unlikely to represent test flights of real human-manufactured dirigibles
as no record of successful airship flights are known from the period
and "it would have been impossible, not to mention irrational, to keep
such a thing secret."[3] Contemporary American newspapers were more
likely to print manufactured stories and hoaxes than modern ones are and
newspapers often would have expected the reader to be in on the fact
that the outlandish stories were hoaxes.[3] Period journalists did not
seem to take airship reports very seriously, as after the major
1896-1897 flap concluded the subject was not given further
investigation.[3] Instead, it was allowed to very quickly drop off the
cultural radar.[3] The subject only received further attention when
ufologists revived studies of the airship reports as alleged early UFO
sightings.[3]

Some argued that the airship
reports were genuine accounts. Steerable airships had been publicly
flown in the US since the Aereon in 1863, and numerous inventors were
working on airship and aircraft designs (the idea that a secretive
inventor might have developed a viable craft with advanced capabilities
was the focus of Jules Verne's 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror). In fact,
two French army officers and engineers, Arthur Krebs and Charles
Renard, had successfully flown in an electric-powered airship called the
La France as early as 1885, making no fewer than seven successful
flights in the craft over an eleven month period. Also during the
1896-1897 period, Bosnian inventor David Schwarz built an
aluminum-skinned airship in Germany that successfully flew over
Templehof before being irreparably damaged during a hard landing. Both
events clearly demonstrated that the technology to build a practical
airship existed during the period in question, though if reports of the
capabilities of the California and Midwest airship sighted in 1896-97
are true, it would have been considerably more advanced than any airship
built up to that time.

Several individuals, including Lyman
Gilmore and Charles Dellschau, were later identified as possible
candidates for being involved in the design and construction of the
airships, although little evidence was found in support of these ideas.

And finally there was this tantalizing tidbit...

Claims of extraterrestrial origin

Early
citations of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, all from 1897, include
the Washington Times, which speculated that the airships were "a
reconnoitering party from Mars"; and the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch,
which suggested of the airships, "these may be visitors from Mars,
fearful, at the last, of invading the planet they have been seeking."
(Jacobs, 29) In 1909, a letter printed in the Otago Daily Times (New
Zealand) suggested that the mystery airship sightings then being
reported in that country were due to Martian "atomic-powered
spaceships." (Clark 2000, 123)

It seems that seeing strange flying things in the skies wasn't just a 20th century thing at all.
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your eyes on the skies.
KJ